About the Project
Our clothes are full of memory and meaning. That’s why we all have garments—hanging in our closets, shoved in the back of drawers, and boxed up in garages—which we haven’t worn in years but just can’t part with. And there are the clothes we wear every day whose stories are still unfolding. Everyone has a memoir in miniature in at least one piece of clothing. The first-person accounts Emily Spivack has collected in WORN IN NEW YORK and WORN STORIES reveal how those clothes protect us, serve as a uniform, assert our identity, or bring us back to a place and time—how they are encoded with the stories of our lives.
About Emily Spivack
Emily Spivack is an artist and writer whose work draws from contemporary culture, clothing, history, and our relationship to everyday objects. She is the author of the New York Times best seller WORN STORIES (2014) and it’s follow-up WORN IN NEW YORK (2017), collections of stories about clothing and memory. In her column for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The Story of a Thing, Emily interviewed cultural figures about objects in their homes. As artist-in-residence at Bard Graduate Center in 2019, Emily exhibited WHY DID THE JALAPEÑO PUT ON A SWEATER?, a compendium of clothing-related jokes that references the classic joke-a-day desktop calendar. As artist-in-residence at MoMA from 2017-2018, Emily invited visitors to contribute to An archive of everything worn to MoMA from November 1, 2017, to January 28, 2018, a permanent part of MoMA’s Archives. Emily’s 2017 off-site installation for the Honolulu Museum of Art, Medium White Tee, was a fulfillment of President Barack Obama’s stated fantasy to run a T-shirt shack that sold only medium-sized white tees. She’s exhibited Sentimental Value, stories about clothes from eBay, made howtodresslike.com, an online archive of nearly 1,000 step-by-step instructions culled from wikiHow, analyzed scented t-shirts, documented wardrobe malfunctions from Craigslist, and highlighted sweat stains on clothes. She and her work have been featured in The New York Times, New York magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vogue, and Art in America.
More information about Emily and her work can be found at emilyspivack.info.